Mary
by jeviennis
Summary: John and Mary moved to a little village three years ago, content with their little bubble of newlywed happiness. Sometimes, however, the world just conspires against happiness.


**Mary**

The first time Mary coughs, it's a Thursday.

The sky is dark outside and it's raining, and as John stares out the window, half hidden by a mountain of paperwork from the surgery, he can hear her throat shred itself from the office.

It doesn't bother him at first, and why should it? He's a doctor, he knows it's just a cough or a cold or something like that. Nothing to worry about in the slightest. So he gives his wife some cough drops and tucks her up in bed, thinking nothing of it.

Two weeks later, her cough is worse. Bad to the point where she can't sleep through the night, so John adds exhaustion to his ever growing mental list of symptoms. But still, John's been a doctor for many years, and he knows that the flu can be a spiteful little bitch when it wants to be, so he doses her up with aspirin, kisses her on the forehead and tries to carry on ploughing through what feels like hundreds of pages of patient histories.

By three weeks, John's fed up. Not with Mary, god no, just with Mary being sick. To John, Mary doesn't suit being sick. It dampens her usually glowing complexion, makes her gorgeous hair stick to her forehead, matted with cold sweat, and dulls her beautiful eyes, making her seem like she's only half there, like the little spark inside her has gone in search of a nicer place. It's then that John decides to take her to the hospital, damn his doctor-ly pride to hell.

So John gets Mary on her feet for just long enough to get her to the car, where she collapses again, shaking and shivering and muttering about how much she aches all over, how she just wants it to stop. John puts on his brave face – his soldier face – and tucks her fringe behind her ear, willing himself to believe the words he says to her.

"It's going to be alright, love, don't worry."

In his head, John's already got his diagnosis sorted, and he doesn't like it one bit.

* * *

><p>When he gets there, the proper <em>hospital <em>doctor, as he haughtily says when John's back is turned but his ears aren't fucking closed, confirms John's mental verdict.

Pneumonia. Treatable when caught early. Unfortunately, as Dr Arrogance points out, it's been brewing and stewing inside Mary for about three weeks. After he's put the poor woman on antibiotics in her private room – after all, her husband works for the NHS now – he corners John outside and slaps him with the full force of the Spanish Inquisition, asking questions like "When did you first begin to recognise the symptoms?" and "Approximately how long has her condition been deteriorating?" and John has never felt smaller in his life, couldn't feel any smaller, not even if he sank through the floor that he's pacing, not even if this doctor hit him with a pissing fly swat. Not even then. All he's thinking over and over, long after the self-important physician has flounced off to work his healing magic on the rest of the hospital, is that if he'd recognised it earlier, if he'd listened closer to the cough, taken her temperature more often, heard her barely there whispers when she said that her chest was hurting, then maybe he could have treated her sooner and avoided all this mess.

John's an army doctor, and he's learnt to deal with much worse than a cold or a cough, so he knows that he's lax when it comes to dealing with them. Pneumonia, however, is not one such illness that can be brushed off a soldier's shoulder with a clap on the back, so unlike a fine wine, John feels like his medical judgement has got shitter, been clouded by the war, clouded by blood and the final screams of dying men. And now he's dropped his wife in it.

In the days that follow, John doesn't think he could feel any worse.

John was wrong.

* * *

><p>Seven days after admission, Mary crashes. The antibiotics don't work and the doctors spend too long trying to figure out what caused it.<p>

Seven days, 10 hours and 56 minutes after admission, Mary Watson is pronounced dead.

* * *

><p>As John half listens his way through the boring procedural garbage that always put him off working in a hospital, Dr Arrogance panics and bullshits his way through the inquest, talking about how if John had only brought her in sooner then her recovery would have been far more likely, and she wouldn't have been so susceptible to the MRSA that eventually caused her lungs to fail. The pretentious men sit behind their desks and come to the conclusion that the hospital isn't to blame for Mary's death and John just feels numb. He wouldn't have cared if they'd spent the rest of their lives hand-feeding him peeled grapes and fanning him with giant jungle leaves, frankly, because his wife is gone and not one of those idiots in their ivory towers seemed to give a damn.<p>

Nine days after Mary's admission, John returns home alone. He spots the files stacked up practically floor to ceiling in his office, and while a tiny part of his mind tells him that the clinic won't care, that he'll get time off for bereavement, the overwhelming majority of his brain shouts at him that he should get started, because he doesn't want anyone else dying because of him, now does he? So he spends the entire night with his desk lit by one lamp, pouring himself completely into the tedious arthritis prescriptions and hip replacements that really don't seem to matter anymore.

The next morning and it still hasn't stopped raining since Mary got sick, and John feels like screaming at the overcast sky that it's the rain's fault, that he blames the fucking clouds for killing his wife. But he's outside in the street, and people are staring at him with pity etched across their faces – Christ, news travels fast in this little village – so he shoves his hands deeper into his pockets and bites back his curses.

When he gets to the clinic, Jenny at the front counter freezes and it's obvious that someone from the hospital got in touch with her, because her face falls from her usual meet 'n' greet smile and she bolts to her feet with a sad look in her eyes that John really, _really_ doesn't want to see. But he knows that she's only being nice, so from the recesses of his head he remembers his manners and forces himself to speak.

"I've just got some patient histories to hand in. Is Claire around?"

With a small nod and a tightening of her lips, Jenny leads him down the hallway towards his superior's office – he's worked there for almost three years now, and he knows his way around, but he really can't bring himself to care or say anything – and deposits him outside Claire's door with a touch on his arm. John feels like steeling himself and he really doesn't know why, so he just goes in, forgetting to knock, and Claire looks around like she's about to be angry that someone burst in without so much as a "How do you do?" but then she sees that it's John, and her face falls almost exactly the same way as Jenny's did, so identical that it's almost laughable, except there's nothing remotely funny about being consoled over your dead wife, so John holds that in too.

"Why are you here, John?"

He half-mumbles something about the paperwork he wanted to hand in and stumbles past the words 'efficiency' and 'medication orders' before he realises that he really doesn't think that those things are the reason he's come in, so he trails off and holds the hand with the files out sheepishly, staring at Claire like a lost child in a supermarket that's desperate to find an adult to help him get back to his parents because he lost them in the sweet aisle.

Claire walks up to him slowly with a compassion in her eyes that John doesn't think he's ever seen before in his ice queen boss, and takes his paperwork off him slowly, as though any sudden movements would startle him. Then it's gone in a second, and she turns him around 180 degrees and pushes him towards the door.

"Go home, John."

When he gets back, John pulls out his mobile, blinking with 45 missed calls – what a time to be popular – and rings the one person he could possibly want to see in all of this, knowing full well that there'll be a murderer far more interesting than any visit to a crummy village.

* * *

><p>Which is why it's a bit of a surprise when Sherlock Holmes turns up on his doorstep with a thoroughly confused expression on his face, mixed in with just a little concern that John knows is only reserved for the few people that he actually cares about. John also knows that Sherlock is not an emotional man, not one to hug or shower affection, which is why somewhere in his mind, John is even more surprised when Sherlock steps forward and tentatively wraps John in his arms at exactly the right moment, just as John's face is crumpling and he doesn't think his legs will hold him up any longer.<p>

For the first time since Mary died almost four days previously, John lets himself cry. He didn't cry when he was tidying up her clothes, or when he was making her side of the bed, or when he ran out of orange juice and realised that Mary always bought it because he got through that carton like he was a parched man in an oasis, but sitting next to Sherlock, who's still got one arm around John's shoulders and a look that says he really doesn't know what the fuck is going on, he loses it all over again. Then Sherlock he starts looking around the house, noticing little details in the way that only Sherlock Holmes can, before he turns back and looks John square in the eyes.

"John, where's Mary?"

And John cries harder and longer than he think he ever has before: harder than when he woke up in Afghanistan and _fuck_, he was still alive and thanked every deity that crossed his mind; longer than when he went to his dad's house for his 79th birthday, and the dementia had got too much and he asked John who he was for the first time.

Sherlock, god bless him, sits there like a fish out of water as John sobs without showing any signs of letting up, shushing John quietly as his mind whirs. He liked Mary – more than Sarah, anyway – and she'd always let Sherlock come over for Christmas, even though it was supposed to be relatives only, just because John had once mentioned in passing that Sherlock didn't really have the most comfortable relationship with his family. She'd always made him the best cup of tea when he arrived to visit, even better than John's, and always asked him if he wanted a ginger nut with it, even if the answer was always no.

And most importantly, she'd always made John happy, and even if Sherlock wasn't always brilliant at expressing his feelings, didn't always want to, he'd always liked that John had a proper genuine smile on his face when he was around her, the one that he got when he was really enjoying himself, like in the good old days when they would both giggle at Jeremy Kyle or solve a massive murder – it was as though just being around Mary was an adrenaline high for him. He didn't know if that was true love, or soulmates, or whatever, but Sherlock knew that he liked Mary from the minute she walked down the aisle in a white dress – hey, she did look rather pretty – and John's face had lit up like a Christmas tree, or a cheap neon bar sign or something.

So gazing around the Watsons' empty house, Sherlock can't help but feel sad. Not just for John, selfishly, but for himself, because he's lost a friend, even if Sherlock Holmes apparently doesn't have friends. But one look at John, who's tear ducts have basically dried up to the point where he's just shuddering, tells him that he was going to have to look after someone else for a while.

John finally falls asleep in the middle of the night, huddled onto his side and leaning into Sherlock's frame a little, so Sherlock detaches himself gently and watches John sigh and frown in his sleep before he tucks the nearest blanket around his friend and heads to find John's house phone to call his family and let them know what's happened, because as much as Sherlock prefers to text, he knows that this isn't the sort of stuff that should be read rather than spoken.

* * *

><p>When John wakes in the morning, face stuff and tear-stained, Sherlock's gone, and has left a hastily scrawled note.<p>

_Gone to get breakfast. You had no tea._

He almost smiles at his friend's completely inability to function with caffeine, before he remembers a second later why his eyes feel so sore and contemplates just going back to sleep and praying he never wakes up, because he really doesn't see how this can possibly get better.

But then Sherlock bursts through the door holding a tattered carrier bag, and when John raises an eyebrow sluggishly, he holds up a small glass bottle.

"We were out of milk."

And while things weren't going to be better, John thinks for the first time in four days that he might just be okay.


End file.
